Blockbuster: GODZILLA MINUS ZERO

With an ear-splitting roar and an aggressively over-cranked sound mix, Godzilla Minus Zero erupts onto the screen with an enormity fitting its subject. It’s the sequel to 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, Japan’s Toho’s latest reboot of their classic franchise. That film took the guise of a historical epic. Set in Japan immediately after World War II, it finds a broken country of haunted people. If the 1954 original made the title creature symbolic of the atomic bomb, Godzilla here is also the irradiated husk of empire. The devastation of the war sits heavily on the entire picture with its characters living in literal rubble trying to rebuild into a positive sense of personal and national identity. Written and directed by visual effects artist Takashi Yamazaki, it wove its real historical trauma seamlessly into its kaiju spectacle. We sit in the grief of a failed kamikaze pilot and orphaned children and aimless sailors. And then scenes of devastation as Godzilla tramples cities is given greater weight. The project clearly intends to restore to the franchise the original sense of fear and disaster. But we also thrill to sequences like the Jaws-inspired action involving a small boat tracking the big creature. It’s a good popcorn combination for a sturdy blockbuster. Its sequel, bigger and louder in every way, perhaps inevitably finishes the usual Godzilla evolution from “He’s so scary…” to “…and he’s our friend.” 

Much like Batman, the decades of Godzilla storytelling exist on a continuum from serious to silly. Each iteration starts closer to the former and pushes inevitably toward the latter. This one doesn’t go full silly, but it takes some big steps in that direction. It begins with introducing the dragon-like Ghidorah. As our returning cast of characters and some new ones reckon with this massive threat attacking Japan, they come to the foregone conclusion: we need Godzilla to fight it. There’s a predictability to its plotting—the early destruction, failed attempts to take Ghidorah out, reluctant agreement to find Godzilla and get him to join the fight, and, finally, the big battle. But there’s a lot of pleasure to be found in seeing those set-pieces done up well with big spectacle and booming sound. When the monsters are roaring, there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. It’s the human drama in between that’s a bit trying to the patience. It’s as overabundant as it is lacking—the period-piece seriousness shorn of its novelty now this time feeling like a thin layer of po-faced sentiment ladled on top of endless limp melodrama. That’s always a tricky balance to pull off between giving us enough Godzilla and giving us some people to care just enough about to give the whole thing a sense of scale. But the advice I’d give all Godzilla filmmakers is also the biggest reason to go see a new Godzilla movie: more Godzilla never hurt. 

Old Man and the Thief:THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK

The dapper gentleman on the subway is looking to pick your pocket. You’d never know it to look at him, all buttoned up in his neat overcoat, an air of aged wisdom in his dark eyes and salt-and-pepper hair. That’s the point. You might not even notice as he brushes past a Wall Street guy that he’s left with the guy’s watch. That’s the goal. There’s something simple and honest about the elder thief in writer-director Noah Segan’s humble drama The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. He’s just taking a little to keep him afloat to the next score. He’s not running a big racket or working for a crime family. He’s just scraping by. The sense of the elegiac is there from the title. We used to have a kind of classy criminal, the movie seems to say, as John Turturro brings a weary dignity to the lead. Sure, he’s lifting your wallet or your phone. But he keeps it painless, and uses his money to subsidize his tiny apartment, care for his comatose wife, and keep him in trips from borough to borough on public transit. He’s Hemingway’s Old Man as a neat thief, doing just enough to get by in a world that's passing him by. 

Contrast that with the inciting incident, which brings Turturro into contact with a slimy mobbed-up tech bro (Will Price). The old man picked the wrong pocket, and now the young guy is desperate to get his crypto USB back. Who’s the real thief in this matchup?, the movie slyly inquires. The younger guy has flunkies, greed, and a sense of callous entitlement. It’s all transactional, even family. The older man has a small tight-knight group of fellow aging New Yorkers with which his way of life has kept him interacting over the decades. There’s an old-fashioned pawn store owner (Steve Buscemi) and a weary NYPD detective (Giancarlo Esposito). They complain about their aches and pains, and have a tired shorthand that we understand comes from decades of living parallel lives. Segan gives the movie a subtle sense of lived-in lives and well-worn spaces. The framing is simple, the places believable. The movie has a patience and care that allows for a low-key suspense in heist movie mechanics to play the background hum of a subtle character piece. Even the big confrontations turn smaller and sadder than you'd expect. Turturro leads with a warm, underplayed charisma that glimmers all the brighter as the darkness grows around him. The effect is subtle and accumulative, culminating in three perfectly chosen shots so simple and so moving that the film’s spell lingers well past its short running time. 

Through the Trees: WILDWOOD

Wildwood is Laika’s first movie in nearly a decade. It’s a suitably grand return. This 131-minute stop-motion animated fantasy is a stunning work of creativity and craftsmanship. Sometimes, watching dozens of characters moving through a complicated action sequence in a highly-detailed environment one simply has to sit astonished at what these artists can accomplish one frame at a time. Laika’s filmmakers first made a name for themselves with entertaining fables with shadowy edges, charming humor, and family-friendly thrills like Coraline and ParaNorman. Their latest is their most ambitious yet, an epic adaptation of a thick children’s novel by Colin Meloy. It is also about children, and it’s sure to delight and terrify mature ones in the audience in equal measure. But it’s not made with children in mind, particularly. It’s simply a robust and densely detailed story sculpted with care for anyone who likes a good yarn. It’s one of those dark and melancholic and violent stories about growing up and discovering that the world is scary and complicated, fractious and unresolved. And it’s about discovering that, even though there is such darkness in the world, it’s also a place of kindness, solidarity, and magic. 

Said magic is found not merely in fantasy worlds of magic and wonder, but in the transferable qualities of heroism and love that the heroes bring back to their real world. The movie follows Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), an ordinary girl in Portland, Oregon, who has the misfortune of witnessing her toddler brother stolen by a swarm of crows. She and a dorky classmate (Jacob Tremblay) chase them into a mysterious deep forest realm where they encounter a society of birds and wolves, bandits and witches (and voices including Carey Mulligan, Angela Bassett, Charlie Day and Mahershala Ali). It happens to be in the middle of conflict. There they’ll find allies who want to help find the baby, and forces of danger that want to manipulate them. Sorting out which are which is part of the delight and tension as the movie goes from a warren of wolves in Napoleonic uniforms to a mansion populated by clothed animal servants of a sniveling human governor to an enormous magic tree. Along the way they also find a city of self-governing birds, an ivy-covered altar hidden in ancient ruins, far from the eccentric streets of Portland to which they hope to return. Those are as lovingly detailed down to every perfectly placed brick. All told, this fantasy is a distinctly American mythos—no Middle Earth or Narnia or Redwall with its Old Europe stylings. It’s a Pacific Northwest fantasy of foggy forest and muddy cliffs, indigenous secrets and outsiders intruding. 

This sturdy fantasy plot allows for the flourishing of craft. The design has wholly convincing spaces. The characters move through them with fluid animation and a real emotionality to their looks, be they human or owl or rat or dog or rabbit. The look and feel will be recognizable to anyone who’s seen director Travis Knight and screenwriter Chris Butler’s earlier movies. There’s something comforting about the Laika house style. There’s the tangible feeling of puppets and dioramas, but there’s a fluidity to their 3D-printed micro-expressions and patient posing augmented with digital effects. The camera and the story moves so smoothly, with characters whose emotions are so legible and evocative. There are moments where I was so swept up in the experience that I forgot I was watching animation. And then the knowledge would hit me with a scene of hundreds of characters moving, while the wind rustles the leaves and the grass, and a variety of smoke and light floats through the scene. Such complexity pulled off with such ease is the Laika way, all in service of a story overflowing with imagination and care. 

Look Here: YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING

Nathan Fielder is used to being the manipulator. His Comedy Central show Nathan for You talked small business owners into elaborate pranks disguised as advertising gimmicks. His HBO show The Rehearsal is even more complicated, an ever-growing nesting doll of practice sessions for all manner of life events that gets all the more tangled by the episode. The fact of his manipulations are the form of his art, and key to the fundamental questions his work asks. What is truth? What is performance? And how are people’s behaviors and perspectives shaped, and pushed? Now his first feature film, singular documentary You Can See Everything, finds him in the position of manipulated. Maybe. That’s not to say he’s the total innocent here, but he’s crafted a film that finds him potentially in over his head with subjects who may want to use him to shape their own narratives more than he wants to use them to make his own art. 

He’s invited by Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans to film the last month before she goes to prison. You might recall she’s the disgraced founder of failed tech startup Theranos, which claimed to have a machine that can run all manner of medical tests from just one drop of blood. That said machine could not do all of those tests is the reason why the company failed and she’s incarcerated for defrauding investors. It also fueled true crime tellings of her story, from a journalist’s book-length expose Bad Blood to Hulu miniseries The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried. The interest in the story is in the character she seems to have created: the “lean-in” tech boss speaking in a low, slow affected voice that somehow charmed big names with deep pockets to fund her efforts. The very caricature she cultivated for her rise, abetted her fall. 

So it makes a certain amount of sense that Holmes and Evans would want to tell their side of the story. They have a vested interest in downplaying the crimes and proclaiming her innocence. In front of the cameras they’ll take care of their kids. They’ll claim total transparency when pressed for details. They’ll assert that she’s never lied, and even make plans for a “Theranos 2.0.” They play some transparently obvious power games with the documentarians. What doesn’t make clear sense is why they’d choose Fielder to record all of this. His playful, prankish approach to the documentary form and his slippery tonal sincerity seems a high risk if the intention is mere reputation recovery. At first he appears to approach the project with a genuine sense of wanting to understand them. His disarmingly blank affect and deadpan jabs allow his questions to hit hard before hitting their defenses. But the more he records the more questions he has. Holmes and Evans are committed to a devious definition of truth tied to pure belief, allowing themselves endless subjectivity while refusing it to others. They denigrate others’ interpretations of their actions as woefully inaccurate while claiming that truth is whatever they believe. 

Fielder, co-directing with Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim, provides an artfully lensed document with intense close-ups and a dread-filled score to keep the sense of suspicion growing as his subjects talk to him and past him. What is their relationship to reality, to truth, to each other, and to this project? We might even change our mind about who’s playing whom several times over. The deeper we get into it, the less we seem to know. Can we really know another person? That’s a fine place to start our inquiry. Somehow it expands to being about the collapse of certainty, the deep confusion of others’ minds. In typical Fielder fashion, what starts seemingly graspable slowly slips out of easy categorization. The way there is tensely uncomfortable, hilarious, surprising, and weirdly moving—sometimes all at once. By the end it’s somehow about everything sick at the heart of our culture. It’s about storytelling and narcissism and deception. It’s about how we know, and if we can know. Looking back, you might even realize it’s all in the title. Just because a camera’s there to see everything doesn’t mean we actually understand anything. 

Anti-Social Media: THE SOCIAL RECKONING

Conventional wisdom on 2010’s Facebook founding drama The Social Network says it’s David Fincher’s direction that makes it great. It's his camera and pacing and precise work with actors that gives it an ice cold framing and a speeding momentum and an endlessly quotable, densely characterized snappiness. But that really does short change screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s contributions. Even on the page it’s one of the great films of this century. Next time you watch it keep an ear on the structure of the interleaving deposition timelines and the dimensionality of character and intent in each conversation. The movie’s complexity is enhanced by the direction, but the screenplay is the foundation that lets it reach those aims. It’s the mix of the two that makes magic. 

And it’s the lack of the two that leaves its new follow up, The Social Reckoning, feeling pretty flat. Sorkin directs his own writing here. He’ll never be mistaken for being as distinctive a director as he is a writer. Not a big surprise the new movie is typically flat and simply staged. Those are the aesthetic decisions, or lack thereof, you’d make if all you wanted to do was letting writing and performance take center stage. But what’s most surprising is how the writing falls short, too. For all his idiosyncratic tendencies, Sorkin can write verbal pyrotechnics as well as anyone. Here it’s all expositional with a light dusting of the chewy self-righteous monologues for which he’s best known. It’s thinner and more utilitarian, more interested in making its points than building its world. If the first film couldn’t go more than a couple minutes without a memorable line, building complicated characters through a hurtling startup story in action, this one’s mostly about people explaining things to each other when they aren’t clicking around. 

Founder Mark Zuckerberg is now a villain lurking in a subplot, caring more about preserving power and time users spend on his site than the social consequences of the platform he runs. He’s played by Jeremy Strong, a good substitution from the original’s Jesse Eisenberg, if only because Eisenberg can never totally remove likability, or at least easy charisma, from his screen persona. Strong plays him as a total blank cocooned from real pushback and warped by a core belief shaped by oppositional defiance. He takes any criticism as impetus to get even worse. If the earlier movie was about how one young man’s antisocial tendencies were inflicted upon the rest of us, the follow-up’s Reckoning is all about what’s happening to the rest of us 20 years on. This movie’s mainly about a whistleblower (Mikey Madison) contacting an investigative reporter (Jeremy Allen White) to raise alarm about internal studies that show harmful effects of Facebook and its assorted social media products. He asks questions. She sneaks documents. Repeat. Meanwhile Zuck preps for a senate hearing with the help of friendly (Wunmi Mosaku) and combative (Bill Burr) interlocutors. All the while, COVID and the January 6th riots loom in the near future as the movie cuts between 2019 and 2021. 

The movie’s not particularly equipped to do anything with all these potentially provocative and productive juxtapositions other than asserting that social media is a social ill. It so obviously is, and it is nice to rehearse the reasons why. We’ve hooked our society and our economy up to these machines that pump poison into the body politic, accelerating radicalization and bullying and the collapse of objective truth. That’s a project that happens to flatter certain would-be authoritarians in our corporate-political landscape. And it leaves the rest of us worse off. But despite this movie’s good intentions and research, the project doesn’t work as drama or as documentary. It’s a pleasantly mediocre hybrid, flattering the assumptions of people who walk in ready to be just as angry. And even they might be surprised how sedate and surface-level the results are here. 

Truth or Consequences: VERITY

Verity, like other Colleen Hoover adaptations, is a twisty melodrama with the dynamics so heightened you get a little dizzy from the altitude sickness. But somehow taking the emphasis off of damaged lovers’ romances, like in It Ends with Us or Regretting You, and into a more straightforward sexy thriller makes for a more effective result. The long simmering tensions bubbling up into straight-faced delirium make sense in this context. It also gives its cast something to hide. This works better to subsume the wildest twists behind doubts and deceptions until the last possible moment. Dakota Johnson stars as a young author hired to sign a non-disclosure agreement and help a troubled bestselling novelist finish her popular series. Anne Hathaway plays the wealthy writer in a deceptive double role in slippery flashbacks and a struggling present. Josh Hartnett is her husband, a nice, supportive guy. Is that suspicious in a movie like this? Johnson moves into their home to sort through outlines and notes and, no surprise, starts formulating her own opinions about the couple’s dynamic as she’s learns about their past and gets entangled in their futures. 

The material makes good use of its cast’s strengths. Johnson, who here has a fine inquisitive blankness to her “resting bored face,” spends most of the movie very slowly reading a secret manuscript that may be a hidden confession to Terrible Deeds, and then wandering the mansion talking to its inhabitants. That each chapter ends on shocking revelations does little to speed her to the end. It’s a sensible chapter a day for this one, the better to string the movie along. It gives Hathaway time to play a wide range of modes, from fresh flirt, to postpartum psychosis, to wounded wife. And Hartnett keeps his chemistry with each woman on a low boil to keep you guessing about his ultimate goal. That the movie is self-consciously playing with the truth and perspective, from the title on down, makes it the kind of smart that people who don’t usually think too hard will find provocative. The rest of us can just vibe with the smooth surfaces’ appeal coaxed along by workmanlike direction and a screenplay that has just the right balance of dread and silliness. From the pretty people to the 80’s-style fonts to the lumbering ominous pace to the trip-wire twists to the fact that all of the bestselling author’s books are designed to look exactly like Hoover’s, it’s a pleasantly unpleasant pulp. 

Down and Out: DIGGER

And here I thought the one bright spot of the end of the world would be respite from having to hear about the ghoulish billionaires and waxworks politicians causing it. What Digger supposes is we’d still be telling their story in the dark ages to come. It’s meant to be funny. Sometimes it is. It’s also a nightmare. Writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work has always played best as dark comedy, despite generally wearing the clothes of serious dramatic art. What is the grim survivalist revenge picture The Revenant if not a bleakly funny pile-on of insult and injury in stunning snowy western landscapes? Or how about the misrerabilist everything-is-connected globalism drama Babel? Its ice-cold framing of overheated dramatic twists has a bleary pile-up of tragedy that’s by turns moving and absurd. It stands to reason his Birdman, the most transparently comedic of his films, is his only Oscar Best Picture, what with its self-consciously showbiz showy one-take gimmick swirling around chewy monologues in the mouths of actors playing actors behind the scenes of a play. His latest is a bit of all of the above, mixed with a Yorgos Lanthimos straight-faced cynicism in the face of fish-eyed weirdness and a Wes Anderson conscious artifice and precisely ornate production design in a nesting doll narrative about narrative. 

It stars Tom Cruise, made more believably his mid-60s age with a dusting of makeup effects, as Digger, a tyrannical oil executive whose life is upended when he learns his drilling has broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Pittsburgh. Said iceberg is in a fast current on a collision course with the European coast. Disaster will ensue. The end of the world, even. The film quickly involves the United States’ government, as embodied by a tottering, quick-tempered, narcissistic president (John Goodman) and his staff of toadies and yes men, including a whimpering Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), snarling military men, and a pastor, all fervently praying with nationalistic fervor. The point is clear. There’s a toxic blend of corporate, religious, and political corruption gassing each other up and midwifing the apocalypse. It’s what Naomi Klein’s latest book calls End Times Fascism, and Iñárritu’s on the case. He’s never a subtle director, and here the stylistic pyrotechnics and thematic points alike are blasted out with a loud lack of subtlety. All the subtext is buried about half an inch deep at best until scene after scene dusts it off and presents it for our double-underlined awareness. And then (here I’ll be freely discussing what the film takes a half an hour to reveal, so reader beware) it’s revealed that we’re many years after the events in question, and we’re watching tech rehearsal for an improbably technically elaborate stage show revival of a play called Fossil Fools. It’s fools all the way down.

The movie’s a collection of good scenes that never quite cohere. The pale, filmic framing and layered artifice from Emmanuel Lubezki remains beguiling throughout. The actors storm and rage and flail in convincing satiric modes bolstered by thundering dialogue. (The supporting cast also includes Sandra Hüller and Riz Ahmed and Jesse Plemons; it’s a whole movie of scene-stealers given the material to fill their time well.) But the cumulative effect is somehow both too complicated and too obvious to support the architecture around it. We’re placed at a remove both from the story in the story and the frame story. The play never really makes sense as a production, and it’s difficult to see why it appeals to the audience gathering to watch it. Nor do we have enough to understand the people putting on the play—they’re more stock type like Director and Producer and Actor. And being stuck in the theater with them gives us a cramped view of a wider world. It’s a hermetic, caustically angry, omnidirectional cynical movie. That it surges to life on the back of its committed cast and aesthetic curlicues makes it watchable and fascinating, even if never entirely successful. It’s perhaps best viewed as a star text for Cruise, who is, after all, playing his first new character in nearly a decade. He’s both an earnest actor fumbling through backstage family drama—a missing daughter, no less!—and a bloviating deep-fried billionaire trapped in his own mausoleum-like mansion where the only thing his wealth has earned him is isolation and futility. It'll take a dissertation to disentangle all those threads. It’s a movie where you might think appreciating the effortful artistry on display is almost enough to recommend sitting through it.